Chicago City Wire

Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke is challenging a petition for a Certificate of Innocence (COI) filed by Kevin Jackson, who was convicted of a 2001 murder and later exonerated under former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

Cook County Judge Erica Reddick granted attorney Fabio Valentini—retained by the State’s Attorney’s Office—two months to respond to the COI petition. 

The decision reportedly surprised Jackson’s attorneys and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which has called for the court to grant the petition and criticized the detectives involved in the original investigation.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx | Facebook

O’Neill Burke’s hiring of outside counsel to evaluate COI petitions marks a shift in policy from the Foxx administration, which often declined to contest such filings.

In a March interview with the Chicago Tribune, O’Neill Burke said exonerations do not always mean a person is innocent and that her office would apply a high bar when reviewing COI requests. She said the law places the burden of proof on the petitioner to establish innocence.

“We are going to do our jobs and contest it when there is a question of innocent or not innocent,” O’Neill Burke told the Tribune. “Just because there are elements of that crime that we will no longer look at it doesn’t mean that person is innocent. If they are, then they have to prove it in a court of law, and that’s where our system works.”

A Certificate of Innocence can be used to pursue financial compensation in civil court for wrongful convictions.

Jackson was convicted in 2003 of the murder of 54-year-old Earnest Jenkins. He was 19 at the time and served 23 years of a 45-year sentence. His conviction was upheld by multiple courts, including the Illinois Appellate Court in 2006, which ruled that physical evidence supported eyewitness testimony.

In 2020, the Conviction Integrity Unit within the State’s Attorney’s Office reviewed the case and reported that it found “nothing [that] requires a change of course.”

In June 2024, Judge Angela Petrone denied a motion to vacate Jackson’s conviction, calling it “troubling” that the State’s Attorney’s Office, under Foxx, had asked her to grant it. That request was based on a special prosecutor’s report concluding that witness testimony had been “improperly assessed.”

The Illinois Appellate Court later reversed Petrone’s ruling and ordered Jackson’s release. The State’s Attorney’s Office had already stated it would not retry the case.

More than 250 people were exonerated during Foxx’s tenure. Many of those cases involved allegations of misconduct by police, prosecutors or both. Most did not include new physical evidence or direct proof of innocence.